The Yoga Class

My junior year of high school, I actually started exercising. My dad had canceled our cable plan and my best friend found her first boyfriend, so our fancy Connecticut gym was the only place I could watch Law & Order: SVU. I’d cycle for the length of an episode, more focused on Christopher Meloni’s tight ass than my own. But at some point I realized that I felt better than I had in years, and I agreed to go to an early morning yoga class with my dad one Saturday.
I think this was before he’d taken up the habit of teaching the class if the instructor didn’t show up, so it was still a pretty low risk outing with Jim. When we walked into the room, there were mats and blocks and straps and blankets, it smelled like feet, and my dad knew everybody. He excitedly introduced me to everyone as his daughter, Sarah, who is student directing the school musical this year! He took me over to the shelf to get a mat, and said I wouldn’t need any of the other offerings on the shelf, so I followed him to the middle of the room and unrolled my mat.
After the sun salutations, we moved onto more difficult positions like tree pose and warriors one and two (and three, if you can twist your body that way, which my middle aged father successfully did). Each time we warped our bodies in a new way, I struggled and my dad didn’t. He’d take a deep breath and grunt quite a bit, but he was able to do every move. I definitely needed the blocks and straps that stiff people were using as aids, but I couldn’t admit that my dad was better at yoga than I was. I would just launch my body quickly into the new pose, hardly breathing with embarrassment and anxiety. But without the deep breaths in and out, I wasn’t getting enough oxygen to my brain. I started to see stars and it felt like my head was filling up with fizzy water. So while my dad went into a headstand, I crumpled in child’s pose, defeated.
